The Guy Not Taken (20 page)

The check from the sale of Aunt Cat’s apartment was still folded in her coat pocket, and she touched it, hoping for strength.

“I need to go now,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He sounded genuinely sorry, like the guy she remembered, the one she’d thought she’d cared for, the one who couldn’t sell Mrs. Bastian’s apartment even though his job depended on it, someone just as lost in the big city as she was herself.

“It’s fine,” she lied. “I’ll be okay.”

She swung her duffel bag over her shoulder. A cab screeched
to a stop the second she raised her hand—a perfect New York moment, one of very few she’d ever had. Jess slammed the door shut before Billy could make it across the sidewalk.

“Port Authority,” she told the driver. She leaned back against the ripped vinyl seat and buried her face in her hands.

•   •   •

She texted Namita to tell her that her plans had changed, and that instead of crashing with her, she’d be staying with Gloria for a while. She told her boss at
eBiz
that her father had died.

“Sure, honey, you can stay as long as you want,” Gloria had said, trying to shove her treadmill against the wall of Jess’s former bedroom. “It’s just . . . do you have any idea how long that’s going to be?”

“I’m not cut out for Manhattan,” Jess finally said. “I tried it for eight years, and I’m just not supposed to be there.” She sat on the portion of her bed that wasn’t covered with stacks of printouts of profiles of her mother’s potential Jdates. Gloria sat beside her and stroked Jess’s forehead with her cool hand. Jess braced herself for the pep talk:
Of course you are, honey! You can do whatever you want to do!
Instead, her mother sighed and said, “So then you’ll find the place you’re supposed to be.”

•   •   •

Jess began sleeping until after eleven o’clock every day, staying up all night, watching infomercials on her mother’s gigantic new television set and subsisting on a diet of those sweetened, artificial-everything cereals she’d never been allowed to eat as a child. She e-mailed Namita and said she was fine. The one time Billy’s number had shown up on her cell phone, she’d punched “Ignore” and gone to the kitchen for more milk. After two weeks of breakfast food and bad TV, an unfamiliar number with a 917 area code appeared on her telephone’s screen and, out of idle curiosity, Jess answered it.

Big mistake. “Jessica?” Toby demanded, in her familiar grating voice. “Steven moved in last week and he can’t find the spare key to the linen closet.”

Jess blinked, then rubbed her eyes. On TV, an actress she remembered from two decades ago was trying to convince her that an at-home teeth-bleaching system would revolutionize her smile, and possibly even her life. “It’s on the top of the little ledge, right next to the . . .”

“No, no, that’s where you said it was, but it isn’t there.” Toby whined.

“Oh.” Jess sat up straight, sending her empty cereal bowl clattering to the floor. “Well, maybe . . .”

“I think
maybe
you should just stop by sometime tonight, help him find the damn key.”

“Well, but the thing is, I’m actually . . .”

“Eight o’clock. He works late. His name’s Steven.” Click. Toby was gone. Hopefully forever.

•   •   •

If life were a movie, Jess would have looked into Steven Ostrowsky’s eyes and fallen deeply and immediately in love. There would have been a whirlwind courtship (during which Toby would have died, conveniently and very painfully) and soon Jess would have found herself reinstalled in the apartment that had formerly been hers, sharing it with a rising star in the world of investment banking and planning their life together. It would have been a shoe-in for the “Vows” column, with a headline involving some witty wordplay on
listings
and
love.

In real life, Steven was Toby in male form, with the same bowling-pin-shaped body, twitchy gaze, and negligible social skills. He leaned against the door frame as his eyes darted from Jess’s hair to her breasts to her hair to her hips to her chest again.

“I’ve looked everywhere,” he said, before retreating to the
living room, now full of leather-and-chrome furniture, glass bookcases filled with DVDs and compact discs, and not a single book. Jess stood on her tiptoes and ran her fingertips along the little ledge over the linen closet door and found the key on her first try. She pulled on her coat and flipped the key onto a stainless-steel assemblage that she supposed was meant to be a table.

“Hey, thanks!” said Steven, pulling his iPod earbuds free and staring at her again. Breast, hips, crotch, face, breasts. “This is a great place. Where’d you move?”

“Vegas,” she said, and let the door slam shut behind her.

•   •   •

She took the bus back to Montclair, slept in her old bed for eighteen hours straight, woke up the next morning, washed her face, combed her hair, and got a job as a waitress (“Jess, you’re wasting your potential!” moaned her mother, on her way out the door to another Jdate). She worked nights at a diner and mornings in a day-care center. (“Wiping two-year-olds’ butts!” said Namita, and rolled her eyes. “This is not what we went to college for!”) For six months, Jess ran a concession cart at the airport called Access-Your-Eyes, which sold knockoff designer sunglasses. (“Are you having some kind of a breakdown?” Gloria inquired over the sound of the dishwasher. “Is that what this is? Because help is available. There are new antidepressants, honey. I see ads for them on TV all the time. You don’t have to suffer!”)

When she was thirty-one Jess landed a position as an assistant to a professor of women’s studies at the University of Pennsylvania, helping her organize a conference on reproductive rights. (“Philadelphia,” Namita snorted. “Just because the
Times
thinks it’s the sixth borough doesn’t mean it’s true.”)

“You did wonderful work,” the professor said at the end of
the summer. “I can offer you a full-time job as a researcher, but it doesn’t pay much.” Jess told her the money was fine and didn’t mention that she had a nest egg. She moved out of Montclair and into an apartment on Delancey Street, a walk-up on the third floor of a big brick rowhouse, on a block lined with trees whose leafy branches arched over the street. In the winter, kids pulled their sleds on the sidewalk past her front door. After walking past a little shop on Pine Street once a week for a year, she finally signed up for a knitting class, and surprised herself by enjoying it. She made scarves, then sweaters, baby hats for her cousin’s kids, a shawl for Namita, an afghan of scarlet and gold for herself. There was a skylight in her bedroom, and she’d lie underneath it, bundled in the blanket she’d made, with a cup of peppermint tea next to her reading lamp, watching the flakes swirl down, thinking,
I did all right for myself. I did all right, after all.

Three years later, Jess’s building came up for sale and she decided to buy it. Her nest egg would more than make a down payment, and she’d been promoted twice at Penn, which would give her enough to pay the mortgage. “A good investment,” proclaimed Gloria. “I guess it’s all right,” allowed Namita, who’d moved from the Upper East Side to the trendy West Village to cohabitate with an arbitrageur named Claude. On a brisk Monday morning in January, Jess pulled on her red wool coat. She went to the bank for a cashier’s check, then walked three blocks to the real estate office on Walnut Street, where settlement would be made.

“Ms. Norton?” said the man behind the desk. “You’re a little early.” He introduced himself as David Stuart, took her coat, poured her coffee, got her settled in another wheeled leather chair in front of another conference room table. He had curly blond hair and red cheeks, as if he’d spent the weekend outside,
in the wind and the sun. She imagined him towing a sled behind him, on his way to the park. There were pictures of two little blond boys in snowsuits on his desk. She added them to the picture.

“So,” he said, offering her cream and sugar, “you’re going to be a homeowner.”

“It’s not my first time,” Jess said. “I had a place in New York a few years back. On the Upper West Side.”

He whistled softly. “Bet you made a bundle.”

“I did all right.”

“But you like it better here, right?”

“Well, I guess I’d better,” she said. “Now that I’m buying.”

“I love it here,” he told her, eyes shining as if he was trying to sell her something, as if she hadn’t already come to buy. “I mean, New York’s great—it’s New York, right? But Philadelphia feels more like a real neighborhood to me. People hold doors for ladies with strollers. There’s this cheese shop on my block . . .” But before he could tell her about the cheese shop, the Carluccis, the sellers, bustled in with their agent and a box of angel wings, crisp-thin pieces of fried dough dusted with powdered sugar. “We’re so happy for you, Jess,” said Mrs. Carlucci, passing Jess a pastry on a napkin.

“She’s just happy that she’ll be somewhere warm,” her husband teased, and put his arms around his wife’s shoulders.

Jess watched David Stuart lick sugar from his lips as he passed stacks of documents around the table. She passed him a napkin. He smiled at her. While she signed her name over and over, he slid his business card across the table.
Want to have lunch after this?
he’d written underneath his name and his title.

She looked at the note, then at him, then raised her eyes to the picture of the snowsuited boys. David Stuart slid another business card toward her.
They’re my nephews,
it said.
I put the picture there to keep Mrs. Carlucci from coming on to me.

Jess smiled, flexed her fingers, and turned another page. A minute later, another business card slid into her stack of documents.
I’m thirty-two. I went to Villanova, then into the army for six years. Then . . .
But he hadn’t been able to fit anything else on the card.

She bit her lip and kept signing.

The next card was brief and to the point.
Do you like Italian food?

She thought about her apartment, how safe and cozy it was, how happy she’d been there, content with her books and her music, not lonely at all. At least that’s what she told herself. Not lonely at all. She nibbled at the edge of an angel wing and piled his business cards into a little stack. Maybe it would turn into something, or maybe nothing more meaningful than a snowflake dissolving on the sidewalk. Either way, she would see. She wrote
yes
on the back of the card on top and slid it back across the table.

T
HE
G
UY
N
OT
T
AKEN

M
arlie Davidow was not the kind of woman who went looking for trouble. But one Friday night in September, thanks to her own curiosity and the wonders of the Internet, trouble found her.

Her brother Jason and his bride-to-be were registered on
WeddingWishes.com
. Marlie, housebound with a six-month-old, did all her shopping online, sitting on the beige slipcovered couch where she spent most of her time nursing her baby, or rocking her baby, or trying to get her baby to stop crying. So, on that fateful Friday night after Zeke had finally succumbed to sleep, she wiped the fermented pureed pears off her shirt, set her laptop on the sofa’s arm, and pointed and clicked her way through the purchase of a two-hundred-dollar knife set. As she hit “complete order,” she wondered about the propriety and potential bad mojo of sending the happy couple knives for their wedding. Too late, she thought, and rubbed her eyes. It was nine o’clock—a time, prebaby, when a night might just be getting started—but Drew was still at work, and she was as whipped as if she’d run a marathon.

Just for the hell of it, Marlie typed in her name and reviewed her own choices, feeling wistful as she remembered compiling
her wedding registry. She and Drew had made outings of it, having leisurely brunches before driving out to the Macy’s in the Paramus Mall to spend hours looking at china and crystal, silver martini shakers and hand-blown margarita glasses from Mexico.

Two years and three months after their wedding, the crystal and the silverware were still in their original boxes in her mother’s basement, awaiting the day when she and Drew would move out of their one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side and into a place with a dining room, or at least a little more storage space. The fancy china had been pulled out twice, which corresponded to the number of home-cooked meals Marlie had made since she’d left her job as publicity director for a small theater company in Chelsea to stay home after Zeke was born.

The telephone rang. Marlie picked it up and looked at the caller ID. WebWorx. Which meant Drew. Who was probably calling to say he’d be even later than usual. She nudged the phone under a couch cushion and then, prodded by an impulse she didn’t pause to analyze, turned back to her laptop, typed the words
Bob Morrison
into the “bride/groom” blank, and hit Enter before she could lose her nerve.

Nothing, she thought, as a little hourglass popped up on the screen. Over the last four years, on and off, she’d looked for Bob online, idly typing his name into one search engine or another during down times at work. She never found anything except the same stale handful of links: Bob’s name listed as among the finishers in a 5K race he’d run in college; Bob mentioned as one of the survivors in his grandfather’s obituary; Bob and a bunch of other graduates of a summer art institute in Long Island. Besides, if Bob ever got married, Marlie figured she’d feel it at some kind of organic, cellular level. After all the time they’d lived together, not to mention all the times they’d slept together, she’d just know.

ONE COUPLE MATCHES YOUR RESULTS
, popped onto the screen.
BOB MORRISON
and
KAREN KRAVITZ. MANHASSET, NEW YORK
.

Marlie jerked her head back from the computer as if a hand had reached out and slapped her. Bob Morrison. Manhasset. That’s my Bob, she thought, and then she shook her head sharply, because Bob wasn’t hers anymore. They’d broken up four years ago. Then she’d met Drew, and now she was married; she was Mrs. Drew Davidow, mother of one, and Bob wasn’t hers anymore.